self-critical - Story 127740 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

The weight of the news was crushing. Liam knew he should be happy for Maya, but the prospect of her move to a different country stole his breath. He retreated into himself, picking apart their shared history.

He should have been more expressive, more engaged in their bond. He was always so reserved, so difficult. He focused on his own failings.

He felt the sting of regret and a sudden wave of self-loathing. He should have been a better person, a better friend. He should have been more.

Emotion: self-critical

Cluster: Shame / Guilt

PC1 (Valence): -1.66 Negative

PC2 (Disposition): 1.28

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion self-critical. During extraction, it was fed through Gemma4-31B and its hidden state activations were captured at 11 layers.

The mean activation across all 1,000 self-critical stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the self-critical emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the self-critical vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:

`L`	0.748
`S`	0.662
`ness`	0.425
`ly`	0.374
`탓`	0.351

Suppressed:

`la`	-0.492
`soon`	-0.304
`(!)`	-0.301
`secured`	-0.284
`cautiously`	-0.280